Film Form

by Sergei Eisenstein

  Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning-weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion of feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.

  As sudden shiftings of the scene, and rapid changes of time and place, are not only sanctioned in books by long usage, but are by many considered as the great art of authorship: an author’s skill in his craft being, by such critics, chiefly estimated with relation to the dilemmas in which he leaves his characters at the end of every chapter: this brief introduction to the present one may perhaps be deemed unnecessary. . . .

  There is another interesting thing in this treatise: in his own words, Dickens (a life-long amateur actor) defines his direct relation to the theater melodrama. This is as if Dickens had placed himself in the position of a connecting link between the future, unforeseen art of the cinema, and the not so distant (for Dickens) past—the traditions of “good murderous melodramas.”

  This “treatise,” of course, could not have escaped the eye of the patriarch of the American film, and very often his structure seems to follow the wise advice, handed down to the great film-maker of the twentieth century by the great novelist of the nineteenth. And Griffith, hiding nothing, has more than once acknowledged his debt to Dickens’s memory.

  We have already seen that the first screen exploitation of such a structure was by Griffith in After Many Years, an exploitation for which he held Dickens responsible. This film is further memorable for being the first in which the close-up was intelligently used and, chiefly, utilized.*

  Lewis Jacobs has described Griffith’s approach to the close-up, three months earlier, in For Love of Gold, an adaptation of Jack London’s Just Meat:

  The climax of the story was the scene in which the two thieves begin to distrust each other. Its effectiveness depended upon the audience’s awareness of what was going on in the minds of both thieves. The only known way to indicate a player’s thoughts was by double-exposure “dream balloons.” This convention had grown out of two misconceptions: first, that the camera must always be fixed at a viewpoint corresponding to that of a spectator in a theatre (the position now known as the long shot); the other, that a scene had to be played in its entirety before another was begun. . . .

  Griffith decided now upon a revolutionary step. He moved the camera closer to the actor, in what is now known as the full shot (a larger view of the actor), so that the audience could observe the actor’s pantomime more closely. No one before had thought of changing the position of the camera in the middle of a scene. . . .

  The next logical step was to bring the camera still closer to the actor in what is now called the close-up. . . .

  Not since Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, some five years before, had a close-up been seen in American films. Used then only as a stunt (the outlaw was shown firing at the audience), the close-up became in Enoch Arden [After Many Years] the natural dramatic complement of the long shot and full shot. Going further than he had ventured before, in a scene showing Annie Lee brooding and waiting for her husband’s return Griffith daringly used a large close-up of her face.

  Everyone in the Biograph studio was shocked. “Show only the head of a person? What will people say? It’s against all rules of movie making!”. . .

  But Griffith had no time for argument. He had another surprise, even more radical, to offer. Immediately following the close-up of Annie, he inserted a picture of the object of her thoughts—her husband, cast away on a desert isle. This cutting from one scene to another, without finishing either, brought a torrent of criticism down upon the experimenter.13

  And we have read how Griffith defended his experiment by calling on Dickens as a witness.

  If these were only the first intimations of that which was to bring glory to Griffith, we can find a full fruition of his new method in a film made only a year after he began to direct films —The Lonely Villa. This is told in Iris Barry’s monograph on Griffith:

  By June, 1909, Griffith was already gaining control of his material and moved to further creative activity: he carried Porter’s initial method* to a new stage of development in The Lonely Villa, in which he employed cross-cutting to heighten suspense throughout the parallel scenes where the burglars are breaking in upon the mother and children while the father is rushing home to the rescue.14 Here he had hit upon a new way of handling a tried device—the last-minute rescue—which was to serve him well for the rest of his career. By March, 1911, Griffith further developed this disjunctive method of narration in The Lonedale Operator, which achieves a much greater degree of breathless excitement and suspense in the scenes where the railwayman-hero is racing his train back to the rescue of the heroine attacked by hold-up men in the depot.15

  Melodrama, having attained on American soil by the end of the nineteenth century its most complete and exuberant ripeness, at this peak must certainly have had a great influence on Griffith, whose first art was the theater, and its methods must have been stored away in Griffith’s reserve fund with no little quantity of wonderful and characteristic features.

  What was this period of American melodrama, immediately preceding the appearance of Griffith? Its most interesting aspect is the close scenic entwining of both sides that are characteristic for the future creation of Griffith; of those two sides, typical for Dickens’s writing and style, about which we spoke at the beginning of this essay.

  This may be illustrated by the theatrical history of the original Way Down East. Some of this history has been preserved for us in the reminiscences of William A. Brady. These are particularly interesting as records of the emergence and popularizing of that theatrical genre known as the “homespun” melodrama of locale. Certain features of this tradition have been preserved to our own day. The successes of such keenly modern works as Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (in their original and film versions) contain ingredients common to this popular genre. These two works complete a circle of rural poesy, dedicated to the American countryside.

  Brady’s reminiscences are an interesting record of the scenic embodiment of these melodramas on the stages of that era. For purely as staging, this scenic embodiment in many cases literally anticipates not only the themes, subjects and their interpretations, but even those staging methods and effects, which always seem to us so “purely cinematic,” without precedent and . . . begotten by the screen!*

  A variety actor named Denman Thompson in the late ’seventies was performing a sketch on the variety circuits called Joshua Whitcomb. . . . It happened that James M. Hill, a retail clothier from Chicago, saw Joshua Whitcomb, met Thompson, and persuaded him to write a four-act drama around Old Josh.16

  Out of this idea came the melodrama, The Old Homestead, financed by Hill. The new genre caught on slowly, but skillful advertising did its work—recalling sentimental dreams and memories of the good old, and alas! deserted hearth-side; of life in good old rural America, and the piece played for twenty-five years, making a fortune for Mr. Hill.

  Another success from the same formula was The County Fair by Neil Burgess:

  He introduced in the play, for the first time on any stage, a horse race on tread-mills. He patented the device and collected royalties the world over when it was used in other productions. Ben Hur used it for twenty years. . . .

  The novelty and attraction of this thematic material cast in scenic devices of this sort quickly made it popular everywhere and “homespun dramas sprung up on every side. . . .”

  Another long-lived earthy melodrama was In Old Kentucky, which with its Pickaninny Band made a couple of millions in ten years for its owner, Jacob Litt. . . . Augustus
Thomas tried his hand writing a trio of rurals—Alabama, Arizona, and In Missouri.

  An energetic all-round entrepreneur like Brady was sure to be drawn towards this new money-making dramatic form:

  All through the ’nineties, I was a very busy person in and around Broadway. I tackled anything in the entertainment line—melodramas on Broadway or the Bowery, prize fights, bicycle races—long or short, six days, twenty-four hours, or sprints—league baseball. . . . Broadsword fights, cake-walks, tugs of war, wrestling matches—on the level and made to order. Masquerade balls for all nations at Madison Square Garden. Matching James J. Corbett against John L. Sullivan and winning the world’s heavyweight championship. This put me on the top of the world, and so I had to have a Broadway theatre.

  Brady leased the Manhattan Theatre with “a young fellow named Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.” and went looking for something to put into it.

  A booking agent of mine named Harry Doel Parker brought me a script called Annie Laurie [by his wife, Lottie Blair Parker]. I read it, and saw a chance to build it up into one of those rural things that were cleaning up everywhere. . . . I told him that the play had the makings, and we finally agreed on an outright purchase price of ten thousand dollars, he giving me the right to call in a play doctor. I gave the job to Joseph R. Grismer, who rechristened the play Way Down East. . . .*17

  . . . We booked it at our Broadway theater, where it ran seven months, never knowing a profitable week. The critics tore it to pieces. . . . During its Broadway run we used every trick known to the barnstormer to pull them in, but to no avail. . . . We depended on “snow”—sloughing New York and its suburbs with “Pass 2’s.”

  One night a well-known minister dropped in and he wrote us a nice letter of appreciation. That gave us a cue. We sent out ten thousand “minister tickets” and asked them all for tributes and got them. They all said it was a masterpiece—made long speeches from the stage to that effect—and followed it up with sermons from their pulpits. I hired the big electric sign on the triangle building at Broadway and Twenty-third Street (the first big one in New York). It cost us a thousand dollars a month. How it did make the Rialto talk! In one of our weekly press notices, which The Sun printed, it stated that Way Down East was better than The Old Homestead. That gave us a slogan which lasted twenty years. . . .

  The manager of the Academy of Music, the home of The Old Homestead, was asked to put Way Down East into his theater.

  He was willing, but insisted that the show and its production was too small for his huge stage. Grismer and I put our heads together and decided on a huge production, introducing horses, cattle, sheep, all varieties of farm conveyances, a monster sleigh drawn by four horses for a sleigh-ride, an electric snowstorm, a double quartette singing at every opportunity the songs that mother loved—forming, all in all, a veritable farm circus. It went over with a bang, and stayed in New York a full season, showing profits exceeding one hundred thousand dollars. After that, it was easy going. I launched a half-dozen touring companies. They all cleaned up.

  The show was a repeater and it took twenty-one years to wear it out. The big cities never seemed to grow tired of it. . . .

  The silent movie rights of Way Down East were purchased by D. W. Griffith for one hundred and seventy thousand dollars, twenty-five years after its first stage production.

  In the fall of 1902, exactly a year before the production of The Great Train Robbery, a moralistic melodrama entitled The Ninety and Nine (the title derives from a familiar hymn by Sankey) opened at the same Academy of Music. Under a striking photo of the climactic scene in the production, The Theatre Magazine printed this explanatory caption:

  A hamlet is encircled by a raging prairie fire and three thousand people are threatened. At the station, thirty miles away, scores of excited people wait as the telegraph ticks the story of peril. A special is ready to go to the rescue. The engineer is absent and the craven young millionaire refuses to take the risk to make the dash. The hero springs forward to take his place. Darkness, a moment of suspense, and then the curtain rises again upon an exciting scene. The big stage is literally covered with fire. Flames lick the trunks of the trees. Telegraph poles blaze and the wires snap in the fierce heat. Sharp tongues of fire creep through the grass and sweep on, blazing fiercely. In the midst of it all is the massive locomotive, full sized and such as draw the modern express trains, almost hidden from view in the steam or smoke. Its big drive wheels spin on the track, and it rocks and sways as if driven at topmost speed. In the cab is the engineer, smoke-grimed and scarred, while the fireman dashes pails of water on him to protect him from the flying embers.*

  Further comment seems superfluous: here too is the tension of parallel action, of the race, the chase—the necessity to get there in time, to break through the flaming barrier; here too is the moral preachment, capable of inflaming a thousand ministers; here too, answering the “modern” interests of the audience, is HOME in all its “exotic fullness”; here too are the irresistible tunes, connected with memories of childhood and “dear old mother.” In short, here is laid out the whole arsenal with which Griffith later will conquer, just as irresistibly.

  But if you should like to move the discussion from general attitudes of montage over to its more narrowly specific features, Griffith might have found still other “montage ancestors” for himself—and on his own grounds, too.

  I must regretfully put aside Walt Whitman’s huge montage conception. It must be stated that Griffith did not continue the Whitman montage tradition (in spite of the Whitman lines on “out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” which served Griffith unsuccessfully as a refrain shot for his Intolerance; but of that later).

  It is here that I wish, in connection with montage, to refer to one of the gayest and wittiest of Mark Twain’s contemporaries—writing under the nom de plume of John Phoenix. This example of montage is dated October 1, 1853 (!), and is taken from his parody on a current novelty—illustrated newspapers.

  The parody newspaper is entitled “Phoenix’s Pictorial and Second Story Front Room Companion,” and was first published in the San Diego Herald.18 Among its several items, ingeniously illustrated with the miscellaneous “boiler-plate” found in any small-town newspaper print-shop of the time, there is one item of particular interest for us:

  “By all the rules of the art” of montage, John Phoenix “conjures up the image.” The montage method is obvious: the play of juxtaposed detail-shots, which in themselves are immutable and even unrelated, but from which is created the desired image of the whole. And particularly fascinating here is the “close-up” of the false teeth, placed next to a “long-shot” of the overturned railway coach, but both given in equal size, that is, exactly as if they were being shown on “a full screen”!

  Curious also is the figure of the author himself, hiding beneath the pseudonym of Phoenix the honored name of Lieutenant George Horatio Derby, of the United States Army Engineers, wounded at Serro Gordo in 1846, a conscientious surveyor, reporter and engineer till his death in 1861. Such was one of the first American ancestors of the wonder-working method of montage! He was one of the first important American humorists of a new type, who belongs as well to the indubitable forerunners of that “violent” humor, which has achieved its wildest flourish in films, for example, in the work of the Marx Brothers.*19

  I don’t know how my readers feel about this, but for me personally it is always pleasing to recognize again and again the fact that our cinema is not altogether without parents and without pedigree, without a past, without the traditions and rich cultural heritage of the past epochs. It is only very thoughtless and presumptuous people who can erect laws and an esthetic for cinema, proceeding from premises of some incredible virgin-birth of this art!

  Let Dickens and the whole ancestral array, going back as far as the Greeks and Shakespeare, be superfluous reminders that both Griffith and our cinema prove our origins to be not solely as of Edison and his fellow inventors, but as based on an enormous cul
tured past; each part of this past in its own moment of world history has moved forward the great art of cinematography. Let this past be a reproach to those thoughtless people who have displayed arrogance in reference to literature, which has contributed so much to this apparently unprecedented art and is, in the first and most important place: the art of viewing—not only the eye, but viewing— both meanings being embraced in this term.

  This esthetic growth from the cinematographic eye to the image of an embodied viewpoint on phenomena was one of the most serious processes of development of our Soviet cinema in particular; our cinema also played a tremendous rôle in the history of the development of world cinema as a whole, and it was no small rôle that was played by a basic understanding of the principles of film-montage, which became so characteristic for the Soviet school of film-making.